Would not just a powerful enough text editor to allow multi-line 'find
and replace' do the trick?

e.g. First a find and replace say to change the type name from 'old' to 'new'.

then find

    <element name="d" type="string"/>

and replace with

 </sequence>
 </complexType>

 <complexType name="old">
   <complexContent>
     <extension base="tns:new">
       <sequence>


Sorry if that sounds oversimplistic. Personally I find a set of decent
text editors as useful as the more sophisticated jobs for some things
like this.

-- 
Stephen Green

Partner
SystML, http://www.systml.co.uk
Tel: +44 (0) 117 9541606

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+22:37 .. and voice


On 13/07/07, Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...> wrote:
> I was looking at refactoring from the standpoint of the data represented
> rather than the XML documents, but it's true that changing an attribute
> to a child element is probably not the best example. Still a useful
> feature for a tool, though.
>
> A better example would be to convert local to global types and elements,
> with automatic substitution of the new global type wherever appropriate.
> Better still if the tool allowed me to do things such as select the
> first three child elements from an existing complexType/sequence to be
> made into a new type definition, converting the existing type to an
> extension of the new type. So:
>
>   <complexType name="old">
>     <sequence>
>       <element name="a" type="string"/>
>       <element name="b" type="string"/>
>       <element name="c" type="string"/>
>       <element name="d" type="string"/>
>     </sequence>
>   </complexType>
>
> to:
>
>   <complexType name="new">
>     <sequence>
>       <element name="a" type="string"/>
>       <element name="b" type="string"/>
>       <element name="c" type="string"/>
>     </sequence>
>   </complexType>
>
>   <complexType name="old">
>     <complexContent>
>       <extension base="tns:new">
>         <sequence>
>           <element name="d" type="string"/>
>         </sequence>
>       </extension>
>     </complexContent>
>   </complexType>
>
>   - Dennis
>